Follow up: Ruby on Rails vs. PHP

So this post is an update.

I've had some more time to play around with RoR since the last time I mentioned it, and for a trial run, I recoded part of an application I had written in PHP.

The result? Arguably a cleaner much more concise solution, but the kicker, in about 1/4 of the time! Seriously! The RoR learning curve wasn't bad at all, although I can still do so much more with PHP than I can with RoR right now.

So getting down and dirty and a few disclaimers:

The reason why development using RoR is so much faster than PHP isn't because RoR is 4x better. PHP itself is a language. RoR on the other hand is scaffolding framework. What that means is, you type in a few lines of code and the framework does all of the heavy lifting and code generation, meanwhile, you have to do everything by hand in PHP.

I.E. creating a page to input and edit items from a database might take you 20-30 minutes for just a half a dozen or less items in PHP. In RoR all you have to do is build the database and set the scaffolding to work! Boom, instant input, edit, delete and even some basic error checking.

Recently, for one of my ventures with some friends from MIT, we had a debate over RoR or PHP development for our site. Clearly its a lot easier to find skilled PHP developers than it is to find Ruby gurus. After learning more about Agile Dev with RoR, we decided look into a few different RoR developers, because for us, it seemed like the most cost effective/results oriented way to go.

We are still in discussions about the developer, but if anyone knows a skilled RoR developer who is willing to work with a crazy start-up crew, drop me a line!

UPDATE: Got a PHP vs. RoR question? Ask me! I'm no expert but I'm might fast at googleing and I'm nice enough to try to help out :-p.